Capital Ward Coun. Clive Doucet has launched a Lansdowne Needs You! campaign aimed at halting negotiations between the city and the Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group to redevelop the park.

On April 22, city council voted 14-9 in favour of entering into 60-days of negotiations for a sole-source development deal with OSEG, headed by Minto CEO Roger Greenberg.

With Mayor Larry O’Brien on hiatus, Doucet said only four councillors would have to change their minds.

Doucet is calling on people across the city to sign a petition and help to develop an alternate vision of the park that can be presented when the OSEG proposal comes back to council.

“We’re going to have to have our vision of the park nailed down and sold at the end of the 60 days,” he said. “We have to turn those heads out beyond the greenbelt to get them to understand that Lansdowne Park is their park. It’s about them.”

Without accessible mass transit for Lansdowne Park, Ian Lee, director of the MBA program at Carleton University’s Sprott School of Business, called the OSEG proposal a “terrible business plan.”

Lee said a sole-source contact reduces transparency and violates all the practices that governments and business schools across North America teach.

But College Ward Coun. Rick Chiarelli said the city has already tried Doucet’s approach, with disastrous results 12 years ago.

“The Lansdowne Live proposal takes probably the top four groups you’d want bidding and brings them all together and offers a solution that ends up being no cost to the taxpayer,” he said.